Red With Reason

"Honorable judges, if there is in your hearts a verstige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled...I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me."

-Facing prosecution for armed revolution against the state,
1963,
Fidel Castro.


Jefferson concluded that the state was at it's best a neccesary evil and it's worst an intolerable one. Speaking from the suburbs of Mumbai, in the province of Maharashtra, India, the state has become (and a while ago too) an intolerable evil. And the answers as well as the questions to the same are the tremors of Naxalbari being felt everywhere. Blood is red. And that means more than just that. A Marx-smitten Mao reigns in the land of Gandhi.


Violence thrives of despair. It is but rarely that this angst is given a decipherable form. The 'Id' of Freud and the angst of J.D Sallinger, though the two aren't really coherent enough to be used the in the same sentence, barely ever find a target that could be deemed legitimate. Enter, Karl Marx. That the lord of average non entities, the landlord, could himself be the devil was the greatest exposition of truth in the last few centuries. Something which has had and will have much greater bearing than the man setting foot on the moon. Marx was the first man, who did in that sense, explore completely the concept of equality. Elliot once said, "Do I dare disturb the universe?", Marx neither sighed at the question nor waited for an answer. (Please do not bother with chronology) He disturbed the order of the universe. The concept of the rich and gifted owning and the distraught and poor owing was blown to shreds. Therein, lies the crux of his appeal. You can either hate him or love him. But you cannot buy him. Nor can you isolate yourself from his theory. He was either a 'commie' or a revolutionary, there isn't a sub-section of society that can be diffident towards Marxist theory. It implies an all engulfing and neccessary conflict. It pre-supposes black and white. The right and the wrong are as definitive as they were under the brutal capitalistic system. The rich are as wrong as the poor were worthless when landlords decided to dip their beaks into whoever the they wished to. Numbers, however, do change the stories. 2% of the world's families own over 90% of immovable assets in developing nations. India has enough billionaires to make a cricket team out of them, yet, if the average Indian had to eat as well as the average (let's not get too far ahead, Europe is a whole new inter-galactic system) Chinese, then Indian food production would have double. All this while we continue to dole out Commonwealth-s and IPL-s. And this has well been the order of things. Whether it be the ascent of the old pre-partition land owning families like the Scindias into post-liberalization India. Or the monoply over illiteracy that the moneylender has. Very little of the economic order has changed. Except, word has spread. The Mortality of Capitalistic systems has been proven over and over again. In Cuba, in Venezuela, In China (questionably) and to some extent in the other liberal and left leaning states like Brazil. India awaits.



Let us take a sample of populace. A congregation of young B.As and B.Coms with well kempt and thin moustaches and well oiled hair, from the villages and towns of India. Men who would after studying (though only very literaly) Marx and Rousseau become watchmen or peones. Not that there is anything wrong in that. Yet, there is a lack of dignity in such a profession that owes to the inherent attatchment of the Indian mind to caste. There is a lack of pay. Due to massive availability of such labor. Thus a Mukesh Ambani builds a monstorosity that he calls a house and employs 400 people as 'staff'. An imbalance that under no god, should be allowed. Hard-work? Mukesh doesn't work harder than the rock-breaking labourer with a child on his back, does he? But that isn't where the buck stops. The civil society is most uncoothed. Apathetic to the plight of the masses. When civil society has listened, revolution has been peaceful. But the angry resentful and money-engined nature of the new Indian civil society is frightening. A revolution is coming. And with good cause too. A revolution that will unsettle the generations that have been living off smartly acquired, highly valued properties. One that will deny privelege to nobility of South Mumbai and South Delhi. A revolution that will shatter the ruins of the mansions of Calcutta and Luckhnow.


Angry men have taken to Islam. They have taken to crime. They have taken to substances. A whole new generation of angry young men are taking to evolution. Human society has seen several stages of evolution. Fire, Script(Language), Agriculture and Industry have passed. Enough has gone wrong since the last big revolution towards evolution and one more leap is required to undo the few steps back. A greater human being is being born. I'm not a communist. That presupposes a society which is communistic. I am someone who does not believe in the current order of the world. I am someone who would rather believe in angry young men. In a different order. Not to wake Uncle Joseph/Vladmir up. But a metamorphosis is required. A metamorphosis which is in desperate need of a catalyst. Most Catalysts are acids. And acids burn. Violence is regrettable, yet natural to angry young men. Men who are trying to fight against oppression. Men who are forsaking the comfort of domesticity. Men who the world will condemn. Yet men who, if they do not forsake the Ithacas that they set out for, will make a change. And then, lords and ladies, history will absolve them.

Guilt, for beginners.

The article is a work of pure fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely co-incidental.

*Bursts out into laughter*

My father is an Architect. However, his job description is quite unrelated to what I want to say. He is also what is called 'comfortable' in matrimonial advertisements. For those of you who do not know the workings of the matrimonial market, it means that he is capable of not only paying for his own wedding but also has enough standing to get his nieces and nephews internships and 'sifaarishes'.

I am a student. I eat a lot and at irregular timings. I travel a lot and am usually late. I buy many things and don't really take care of them. I have lost a cell phone, 2 Ipods, a hair trimmer, a walkman, a digital camera and a Rs. 16,000 pendant which I was told to wear for astrological reasons, in the 17 very short years of my existence. The fact that I can sit infront of a computer screen and indifferently (or maybe not) recount these things, and still go out to shop tommorow, is also a corollary to the fact that my father is 'comfortable'.

My pocket money is Rs. 3,500. Equating that with my monthly expenditure would be nothing short of the Enron scandal. My driver who has two daughters and a(?) wife earns Rs. 8,500 a month. Besides all of this he also picks up my father's bags, goes to get my xeroxes, carries my little cousins underwear enroute the swimming pool and calls me 'bhaiya'. Being a tad more courteous than the rest of this world, I call him uncle. So I am Rishi 'bhaiya' and he is Bhagwan 'Uncle'. That is what money does. I am my uncle's bhaiya. This dual relationship, of age vs. monetary standing I share with most of the population of my country. After all my father is one of the few who are comfortable.

I'll probably spend an hour discussing my blog with someone or the other on the phone. That would cost Rs. 60. Assuming that I spend no more than that in a day at an average on the phone, my monthly phone expense turns out to be Rs. 1800. That's Rs. 1,200 less than the average monthly income of an Indian. Had my father not been comfortable, my family would have to somehow manage to live within Rs. 1,200 or I would have to part with phone (Ha!?).

I always thought averages were desirable. That the world was at some sort of an equilibrium. That it was good to be like the rest. Maybe that's why I always ended up with average marks. However my teachers always maintained I was above average. They would not defile me with that heinious word that equates me with a populace that earns Rs.3,000 a month. I wasn't going to an average school, in some godforsaken part of the country. I was going to a private school. My father was no average rag-tag. He was a comfortable man.
*smile of contentment*